Comment by nonrandomstring | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nonrandomstring | Hacker News Reader

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nonrandomstring

> We keep repeating the pattern of scaling some technical innovation up to all of society, and then years later discovering that it was really harmful.

You missed the problematic last step.

We take technical innovations to a societal scale, discover a really harmful effect, and then stubbornly do the square root of bugger-all about it.

It's expected that harms, especially through complex side-effects take time to emerge. We can't see the future, nor can we exhaustively test everything in advance.

The problem comes with the response. A certain amount of market inertia is to be expected. Recalling and replacing products is expensive.

But what is absolutely inexcusable, and ripe for immediate radical global action to address [1], is the disgraceful, blatantly criminal behaviour of large corporations who move to suppress science, discredit researchers, silence critics and bury bad news.

Many problems concerning at-scale blow-back turn out to have been known about decades in advance of their impact.

[1] https://goodmenproject.com/the-good-life/the-corporate-death...

EDIT: A better link on the idea of the "corporate death penalty" (actually quite a good read in itself) [2]

[2] https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/01/08/its-time-bring...

This is nonsense. We have solved a ton of environmental problems in my lifetime. When I was a kid, there were legitimate worries about the ozone layer -- we banned CFCs and now it's a non-issue. Acid rain is vastly mitigated. Before I was born, we cleaned up America's rivers. And we've dropped per capita carbon emissions in the US by about 40% so far from its high in the 70s.

It’s not that we haven’t solved some major environmental problems; it’s that we haven’t solved all of them. In the U.S. we are also in a political environment where one party absolutely does not care. Republicans have gone from creating the EPA under Nixon and using cap and trade under Reagan to now considering environmental mitigation a leftist plot to destroy America. Dropping per capita carbon consumption is not the relevant thing to look at. When it comes to pollution and environmental effects the total amount is what matters. If x tons of a chemical causes a problem then talking about per capita values is meaningless.

The other party puts forward a figleaf of caring to appease its climate-minded constituents, while actively doing the doing the dirty work in the interests of some of the largest polluters on this planet.

Sure. If the political center of the U.S. shifted leftward to what it was back in the 70s then maybe the left leaning party would push for more tangible policies.

In my mind, part of the problem is that both parties are pandering to a base with nonsensical policies. One party wants to do nothing because that is popular. The other party is apparently allergic to economically-based policies like cap-and-trade or a revenue neutral tax and instead wants to throw money at the problem. Neither approach is particularly effective.

(At least one side is willing to acknowledge that the problem exists. That’s worth something but maybe not very much.)

It's not the parties, it's the people. In Washington state some environmental groups fought against a revenue-neutral carbon reduction plan because it didn't give them a slush fund. A couple years later they got an initiative which involved teaching carbon and sending them the money -- surprise, voted down too. Been six years IIRC since we could have had a tax on carbon.

Democrats have proposed cap and trade for carbon and indeed supported this when it came to acid rain. I think your view about both parties pushing absurd positions on this topic is incorrect.

This one might be a tough nut to crack. The carbon-fluoride bonds present in these chemicals require much more energy to break than what is found in nature, e.g. as heat and sunlight. These chemicals simply do not degrade, and due to their surfactant properties, they are almost impossible to contain once spread to the environment.

We have no way of getting rid of these chemicals except possibly to spread more chemicals, which then would need to break apart only those specific molecules AND capture their fluoride ions in some inert matrix to prevent them from forming other compounds as well as directly affecting the environment and our bodies.

We’re pretty much SOL and the only thing we can do is STOP using fluoride chemicals permanently, which we can’t entirely do, because things like uranium enrichment are dependent on teflon.

We could ban halogens unless its impossible to substitute. PVC can be replaced with polyurethane or polyethylene. Hydrocarbon refrigerants instead of HCFCs or pentafluoroethane. If a tiny bit of teflon is needed for uranium enrichment, so be it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorofluorocarbon#History "CFC known to be an issue in 1974." What followed was a slow walk of bans that is still progressing. And it was fought. "In 1986 DuPont, with new patents in hand, reversed its previous stance and publicly condemned CFCs." There's plenty of non-compliance with the bans: "In 2018 public attention was drawn to the issue, that at an unknown place in east Asia an estimated amount of 13,000 metric tons annually of CFCs have been produced since about 2012 in violation of the protocol."

So, I state that while CFCs are mostly banned right now. They're still an issue, and it took far too long to regulate. It is seriously not nonsense.

I was responding to a poster who said:

> and then stubbornly do the square root of bugger-all about it.

That's nonsense. There's a world of difference between "we do nothing about environmental problems," and "I think some particular action should've taken five less years go do," and when you retreat to that position it's a different point entirely.

As to whether it took "too long" to regulate CFCs, what's your measure for that? Is it just vibes? If we had started the process of banning CFCs five years earlier, what's your assertion for the harm mitigated compared to the factual?

The 'do bugger all about it' wasn't aimed at society. It was aimed at internal company reports. PFAS was known to be harmful by DuPoint but they kept making it. Nicotine and tobacco industry. Global warming and oil industry.

What I honestly don’t understand is what the individual employees of these companies think. I’d love to see a documentary with interviews of a wide swath of employees (different levels within the companies) and how they rationalized this aggregate behaviour. Do they not have children and grandchildren? Do they think they don’t breathe the same air and drink the same water?

Certainly some, probably low level employees, didn’t feel they had the luxury of questioning their company’s ethics and looking for work elsewhere, but what about all the more senior people who presumably sat in boardrooms and spun ways to continue pouring shit into the environment with reckless abandon? What am I missing?

> how they rationalized this aggregate behaviour.

Fictionalised, quite accurately perhaps, Michael Cristofer as Phillip Price and Bruce Altman playing Terry Colby in Sam Esmail's "Mr Robot" both do an outstanding job of capturing the shrugging banality of evil at genocidal scale. The feeling I got from that (Esmail is a first class writer) was of those inside accounts of the Nuremberg trials with Eichmann laughing

The banality of evil is that murdering a million people is just something you do on a nondescript Wednesday afternoon over wine and canapés while everyone is watching the clock to get out to the golf course.

There is no "rationalisation". No moustache twisting or maniacal laughter. No drama. No thought at all. It is the "amorality", the total absence of moral thought that is horrifying beyond anything Colonel Kurtz could conjure up at the dark end of the river.

I will check that out, but one point: I don’t see the Nazi atrocities as good comparables. Those examples are people doing horrible things to other people. In the current instances of people at major corporations poisoning the air, water, and land, they are doing horrible things to themselves, their loved ones, their descendants. It is like a slow motion mass suicide. I feel like it is significantly more difficult to explain, as it can’t be rationalized as crimes being done to some demonized group that isn’t seen as deserving of protection. How can self-harm (and harm to your own loved ones) be moralized in the same manner that Nazis felt their acts to be moral?

> they are doing horrible things to themselves, their loved ones, their descendants. It is like a slow motion mass suicide. I feel like it is significantly more difficult to explain,

Excellent points, well worth thinking about more.

Hardly nonsense considering the speed of implementing new things far exceeds the research and attempts to scale back once harm has been identified. Private interests are far more powerful and well funded than the few scientists sounding alarms and attenpting to caution people. There were warnings about greenhouse gases causing climate change at least as far back as 1912, yet despite this the car and oil industries pushed forward against ethanol fuel, electric powered vehicles, public transportation, etc to spread and strengthen an automobile-centered norm of going about, which we take for granted as the way to get around and turning away from that is far more unlikely today than it would have been in 1912 if the science had been heeded and changes had been made. This is the norm of industries vs science, and it is present in almost every facet of our lives. Additionally, the issue with the ozone layer is still very much not a non-issue.

I think gp was arguing against the idea that there was a "problematic last step" where society does nothing about problems once they are discovered - not against the idea that innovation can bring unforeseen problems.

I don't think there was anything remotely close to a scientific consensus, or even a respected minority view, that fossil fuels would cause dangerous global warming in 1912, but correct me if I am wrong.

Ozone damaging refrigerants are still a huge issue. China has been releasing a lot of them. We dumped all the DDT in the ocean. This stuff isn't solved at all. Things don't go away, there's no magic wand to disappear all our horrible choices...

Non-issue? The hole in the ozone layer still exists today.

We're still using refrigerants with halogens when completely benign, more-efficient, and low GWP hydrocarbons are right there!

> We have solved a ton of environmental problems in my lifetime.

While creating a ton of new ones, which is sadly in the nature of most solutions; They tend to create new problems.

The question is how much "environmental capital" do we have left trying to figure out something actually long-term sustainable.

>EDIT: A better link on the idea of the "corporate death penalty" (actually quite a good read in itself) [2]

Okay, but isn't "corporate death penalty" equivalent to a fine that exceeds the value of the company? If we're having trouble fining companies for even 1% of their market value, then demanding a 100% fine seems a bit premature. The whole situation feel like people wanting to reduce wealth inequality by demanding a communist revolution, rather than something more reasonable like higher tax brackets.

> 100% fine seems a bit premature.

I don't necessarily agree with the "corporate death penalty" (for the same reasons I don't sanction individual death penalty - that organisations like individuals are not necessarily coherent and unified systems with clear intent and culpability) It's potentially a vast destruction of wealth unrelated to the crime.

BUT: It's a good example of radical action that's needed right now, so that's why I put it out there. The one thing that I vehemently disagree with you about is that it's in any way "premature". We are in the last seconds before midnight, and we ought to have the will put anything remotely effective on the table, before the crazies do, because they will soon have the will, the means, and the moral justification to go way beyond mere "corporate death penalties".

I'm encouraged that we have made sweeping changes in the past and altered the course of a disaster. Two examples are atmospheric CFCs and DDT.

Agreed it's harder now with increased misinformation, corporate capture, and failed political systems.

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